Sarah Austin
Encyclopedia
Sarah Austin was an English
editor and translator of German texts, the daughter of John Taylor, a yarn maker, hymn writer
and member of the well-known Taylor family of Norwich
.
testified the esteem which he felt for her by the title of Mutter, by which he always addressed her. Her father, John Taylor, was a yarn maker of Norwich. Their friends included Dr. James Alderson
and his daughter Amelia Opie
, Henry Crabb Robinson
, the Gurneys and Sir James Mackintosh.
Her great-grandfather, Dr John Taylor (1694–1761), had been pastor of the Presbyterian church there, and wrote a polemical work on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1738), which called forth treatises by Jonathan Edwards on original sin
.
Sarah Taylor married John Austin at St George Colegate, Norwich, 24 August 1819. They lived in Queen Square, Westminster
, where Mrs Austin, whose tastes, unlike her husband's, were extremely sociable, gathered round her a large circle, Jeremy Bentham
, James Mill
and the Grote
s being especially intimate. She travelled extensively, namely to Dresden
and Weimar
.
The only child of the marriage, Lucie
was herself a translator of German works. She became Lady Duff-Gordon after she married Alexander Duff-Gordon. She undertook the 1843 translation Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece, 1843 by Barthold Georg Niebuhr
, after which it was edited by Sarah Austin and has come to be wrongly attributed to her. The family history was recorded in Three Generations of English Women (1893), by Sarah Taylor's granddaughter, Mrs Janet Ross
.
. Her own criticisms are few, but they are excellent, and are marked by that temperance and good sense which distinguished every line she wrote.
In 1834 she translated The Story without an End by Friedrich Wilhelm Carové
, and this admirable translation has since been often republished. In the same year she translated the famous report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, addressed by Victor Cousin
to Count Montalivet, minister of public instruction. In the preface she pleads eloquently for the cause of national education. 'Society,' she says, 'is no longer a calm current, but a tossing sea; reverence for tradition, for authority, is gone. In such a state of things who can deny the absolute necessity of national education.?' In 1839 she returned to the same subject in a pamphlet, originally published in a short-lived periodical, Cochrane's Foreign Quarterly Review. Arguing from the experience of Prussia and France, she urged the establishment in England of a national system of education.
One of her last publications (1859) consisted of two letter's addressed to the Athenæum on girls' schools and on the training of working women. In these she shows that she had modified her opinions. Speaking of the old village schools, she admits that the teachers possessed little book lore. They were often widows "better versed in the toils and troubles of life than in chemistry or astronomy.... But the wiser among them taught the great lessons of obedience, reverence for honoured eld, industry, neatness, decent order, and other virtues of their sex and stations," and trained their pupils to be the wives of working men. In 1827 Mrs. Austin went with her husband to Germany and settled in Bonn
. She collected in her long residence abroad materials for her work, Germany from 1760 to 1814, which was published in 1854. Some (chapters of it had previously appeared as articles in the Edinburgh Review
and the British and Foreign Review.
After her husband's death in 1859 she produced a coherent and near complete edition of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, an enormous task that required assembling his scattered notes and marginalia. Her modesty regarding this contribution had been overlooked by legal scholars, but later authors, on the evidence of letters from contemporaries, gave her greater recognition for the work, and for her influence on John Austin's career. She also edited the Memoirs of Sydney Smith
(1855) and Lady Duff-Gordon's Letters from Egypt (1865). She died at Weybridge
on the 8th of August 1867. Her estate was valued at less than £5000 and was proved on 28 August 1867; the executor of the will being her son-in-law, Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon.
The following is a list of her principal works, besides those already named:
. When this translation was published, her intimate friend Sir George C. Lewis wrote to her saying, "Murray is very desirous that you should undertake some original work. Do you feel a Beruf of this sort?" But she did not feel such a Beruf; most of her subsequent works consisted of translations.
In 1861 she wrote, as a preface to a new edition of The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, a memoir of her husband full of pathos. From that time to 1863 she was laboriously engaged in preparing for the press a large mass of manuscript notes of his lectures, and in that year appeared Lectures on Jurisprudence, or the Science of Positive Law. She was meditating the preparation of a new edition when she died on 8 August 1867 at Weybridge of heart disease.
Sarah Austin did not possess genius, but all she wrote is marked by nice discrimination and the touch of the true literary artist. Her style is clear, unaffected, and forcible. She had a high standard of the duties of a translator, and she sought to conform rigorously to it. "It has been my invariable practice," she herself said, "as soon as I have engaged to translate a work, to write to the author of it, announcing my intention, and adding that if he has any correction, omission, or addition to make, he might depend on my paying attention to his suggestions." She did much to make the best minds of Germany familiar to Englishmen. and she left a literary reputation due as much to her conversation and wide correspondence with illustrious men of letters as to her works.
English people
The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
editor and translator of German texts, the daughter of John Taylor, a yarn maker, hymn writer
and member of the well-known Taylor family of Norwich
Norwich
Norwich is a city in England. It is the regional administrative centre and county town of Norfolk. During the 11th century, Norwich was the largest city in England after London, and one of the most important places in the kingdom...
.
Life
Sarah Austin, who was the youngest of her family, was educated under the direction of her mother, Susannah Cook, and, it is said, received both her beauty and her talent. She was remarkably handsome and attractive, and it caused some surprise in Norwich when she married the grave Austin. The marriage, which took place in 1820, was a union of rare intellectual sympathy, and one to which she brought an unusual share of devotion. During the first years of their married life they lived in Queen's Square, Westminster. Mrs. Austin's stately yet charming manners, her talk always full of information, interesting and sensible, if not brilliant, and her many-sided nature made her many warm friends. John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
testified the esteem which he felt for her by the title of Mutter, by which he always addressed her. Her father, John Taylor, was a yarn maker of Norwich. Their friends included Dr. James Alderson
James Alderson
Sir James Alderson MD, FRS was an English physician born and based in Kingston upon Hull. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians.-Biography:...
and his daughter Amelia Opie
Amelia Opie
Amelia Opie, née Alderson , was an English author who published numerous novels in the Romantic Period of the early 19th century, through 1828.-Life and work:...
, Henry Crabb Robinson
Henry Crabb Robinson
Henry Crabb Robinson , diarist, was born in Bury St. Edmunds, England.He was articled to an attorney in Colchester. Between 1800 and 1805 he studied at various places in Germany, and became acquainted with nearly all the great men of letters there, including Goethe, Schiller, Johann Gottfried...
, the Gurneys and Sir James Mackintosh.
Her great-grandfather, Dr John Taylor (1694–1761), had been pastor of the Presbyterian church there, and wrote a polemical work on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1738), which called forth treatises by Jonathan Edwards on original sin
Original sin
Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
.
Sarah Taylor married John Austin at St George Colegate, Norwich, 24 August 1819. They lived in Queen Square, Westminster
Westminster
Westminster is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, southwest of the City of London and southwest of Charing Cross...
, where Mrs Austin, whose tastes, unlike her husband's, were extremely sociable, gathered round her a large circle, Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
, James Mill
James Mill
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo, and the father of influential philosopher of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill.-Life:Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of...
and the Grote
George Grote
George Grote was an English classical historian, best known in the field for a major work, the voluminous History of Greece, still read.-Early life:He was born at Clay Hill near Beckenham in Kent...
s being especially intimate. She travelled extensively, namely to Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
and Weimar
Weimar
Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...
.
The only child of the marriage, Lucie
Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon
Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon was an English writer. She is best known for her Letters from Egypt and Letters from the Cape. She had TB and in 1851 went to South Africa for the 'climate' which she hoped would help her health, living near the Cape of Good Hope for several years before travelling to Egypt...
was herself a translator of German works. She became Lady Duff-Gordon after she married Alexander Duff-Gordon. She undertook the 1843 translation Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece, 1843 by Barthold Georg Niebuhr
Barthold Georg Niebuhr
Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish-German statesman and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. Classical Rome caught the admiration of German thinkers...
, after which it was edited by Sarah Austin and has come to be wrongly attributed to her. The family history was recorded in Three Generations of English Women (1893), by Sarah Taylor's granddaughter, Mrs Janet Ross
Janet Ross
-Early life:Janet Duff Gordon was the daughter of Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon and Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon. Her father held a number of government positions, including Commissioner of Inland Revenue and her mother wrote the classic Letters from Egypt...
.
Works
Austin's literary translations was a principal means of financial support for the couple, and she did much to promote her husband's works during his life and published a collection of his Lectures on jurisprudence after death. In 1833 she published Selections from the Old Testament, arranged under heads to illustrate the religion, morality, and poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures. "My sole object has been," she wrote in the preface, "to put together all that presented itself to my own heart and mind as most persuasive, consolatory, or elevating, in such a form and order as to be easy of reference, conveniently arranged and divided, and freed from matter either hard to be understood, unattractive, or unprofitable (to say the least) for young and pure eyes." In the same year she published one of the many admirable translations by which she is best known: Characteristics of Goethe from the German of Falk, Von Müller, and others, with valuable original notes, illustrative of German literatureGerman literature
German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German part of Switzerland, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there...
. Her own criticisms are few, but they are excellent, and are marked by that temperance and good sense which distinguished every line she wrote.
In 1834 she translated The Story without an End by Friedrich Wilhelm Carové
Friedrich Wilhelm Carové
Friedrich Wilhelm Carové was a German philosopher and publicist.-Biography:...
, and this admirable translation has since been often republished. In the same year she translated the famous report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, addressed by Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.-Early life:...
to Count Montalivet, minister of public instruction. In the preface she pleads eloquently for the cause of national education. 'Society,' she says, 'is no longer a calm current, but a tossing sea; reverence for tradition, for authority, is gone. In such a state of things who can deny the absolute necessity of national education.?' In 1839 she returned to the same subject in a pamphlet, originally published in a short-lived periodical, Cochrane's Foreign Quarterly Review. Arguing from the experience of Prussia and France, she urged the establishment in England of a national system of education.
One of her last publications (1859) consisted of two letter's addressed to the Athenæum on girls' schools and on the training of working women. In these she shows that she had modified her opinions. Speaking of the old village schools, she admits that the teachers possessed little book lore. They were often widows "better versed in the toils and troubles of life than in chemistry or astronomy.... But the wiser among them taught the great lessons of obedience, reverence for honoured eld, industry, neatness, decent order, and other virtues of their sex and stations," and trained their pupils to be the wives of working men. In 1827 Mrs. Austin went with her husband to Germany and settled in Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
. She collected in her long residence abroad materials for her work, Germany from 1760 to 1814, which was published in 1854. Some (chapters of it had previously appeared as articles in the Edinburgh Review
Edinburgh Review
The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur from Publilius Syrus.In 1984, the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review,...
and the British and Foreign Review.
After her husband's death in 1859 she produced a coherent and near complete edition of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, an enormous task that required assembling his scattered notes and marginalia. Her modesty regarding this contribution had been overlooked by legal scholars, but later authors, on the evidence of letters from contemporaries, gave her greater recognition for the work, and for her influence on John Austin's career. She also edited the Memoirs of Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith was an English writer and Anglican cleric. -Life:Born in Woodford, Essex, England, Smith was the son of merchant Robert Smith and Maria Olier , who suffered from epilepsy...
(1855) and Lady Duff-Gordon's Letters from Egypt (1865). She died at Weybridge
Weybridge
Weybridge is a town in the Elmbridge district of Surrey in South East England. It is bounded to the north by the River Thames at the mouth of the River Wey, from which it gets its name...
on the 8th of August 1867. Her estate was valued at less than £5000 and was proved on 28 August 1867; the executor of the will being her son-in-law, Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon.
The following is a list of her principal works, besides those already named:
- Translation of a Tour in England, Ireland, and France by a German Prince, 1832. (Lond. 1832), after PücklerPücklerPückler :* Hermann von Pückler-Muskau , German nobleman, artist...
's Briefe eines Verstorbenen - Translation of Raumer's England in 1835, 1836.
- Fragments from German Prose Writers, 1841.
- History of the Reformation in Germany and History of the Popes (1840), from the German of Leopold von RankeLeopold von RankeLeopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources , an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .-...
- Sketches of Germany from 1760 to 1814 (1854), dealing with political and social circumstances during that period.
- Translation of François GuizotFrançois GuizotFrançois Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848, a conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, and worked to sustain a constitutional...
on the Causes of the Success of the English Revolution, 1850. - Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans, 1859.
- Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt, edited by Mrs. Austin, 1865.
- Letters of Sydney Smith, 1855 (second volume of Lady Holland's Life and Letters).
Criticism
This book, by which she is best known, still holds its place as an interesting and thoughtful survey of German institutions and manners. In the autumn of 1836 she accompanied her husband to Malta, busying herself while there with investigations into the remains of Maltese art. On their return from that island, she and her husband went to Germany. Thence they passed to Paris, where thev remained until they were driven home by the revolution of 1848. In 1840 she translated, Ranke's History of the Popes, which was warmly praised by Thomas Babington Macaulay and Henry Hart MilmanHenry Hart Milman
The Very Reverend Henry Hart Milman was an English historian and ecclesiastic.He was born in London, the third son of Sir Francis Milman, 1st Baronet, physician to King George III . Educated at Eton and at Brasenose College, Oxford, his university career was brilliant...
. When this translation was published, her intimate friend Sir George C. Lewis wrote to her saying, "Murray is very desirous that you should undertake some original work. Do you feel a Beruf of this sort?" But she did not feel such a Beruf; most of her subsequent works consisted of translations.
In 1861 she wrote, as a preface to a new edition of The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, a memoir of her husband full of pathos. From that time to 1863 she was laboriously engaged in preparing for the press a large mass of manuscript notes of his lectures, and in that year appeared Lectures on Jurisprudence, or the Science of Positive Law. She was meditating the preparation of a new edition when she died on 8 August 1867 at Weybridge of heart disease.
Sarah Austin did not possess genius, but all she wrote is marked by nice discrimination and the touch of the true literary artist. Her style is clear, unaffected, and forcible. She had a high standard of the duties of a translator, and she sought to conform rigorously to it. "It has been my invariable practice," she herself said, "as soon as I have engaged to translate a work, to write to the author of it, announcing my intention, and adding that if he has any correction, omission, or addition to make, he might depend on my paying attention to his suggestions." She did much to make the best minds of Germany familiar to Englishmen. and she left a literary reputation due as much to her conversation and wide correspondence with illustrious men of letters as to her works.